


If we were vampires

by anchors



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Bathing/Washing, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:40:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23878555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anchors/pseuds/anchors
Summary: The problem with being immortal was that they weren’t, not really.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 80





	If we were vampires

**Author's Note:**

> accompanying playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3cABVkIba7daJhi9BdmGDV?si=TOgoYOcjTrW3xO1srgcXBw).

Aziraphale has been giving him his space, because Aziraphale would like you to believe that he’s nothing if not considerate. 

But there are things you learn about someone after they’ve been hanging around for a decade or two or rather longer than they haven’t. Things you learn about yourself, and Crowley recognizes the signs the way he recognizes his own face in the windows of passing cars: brief, blurred, close enough to mistake for danger. It’s the watchful tilt of Aziraphale’s head whenever Crowley enters a room, as if he’s adjusting the axis of the space on his presence. The politeness of his touch in any place not a bed. 

Sometimes this _look_ he sends Crowley’s way, a bruise of a glance, green and tender to the touch.

The first time he’d seen it outside of a mirror was a week ago, roof of Crowley’s building, passing the last of the Ritz’s finest back and forth as they watched the planes blink over London. They’d talked it all out, hellfire and holy water and the quality of the _Henri Giraud_ , and the sun was going down. Only so much stalling to be done.

Aziraphale had asked him how long, and Crowley had told him, and Aziraphale had looked stunned and pleased and guilty all at once.

I’m sorry, he’d said. That’s an awfully long time to -

Don’t be. That’s the problem with being immortal, isn’t it? All the time.

And then that look, and there weren’t any obvious words for his expression this time, just that it looked as if it had fallen from a very great height, and Crowley knew that for some time they’d been feeling their way, alone, around the edges of a reckless thought:

The problem with being immortal was that they weren’t, not really.

And so Crowley’s been spending the days since feeling like the moon - an odd gravity to the distance Aziraphale holds in their orbit, Aziraphale in the daylight always carefully a room away but only ever a room. The electricity of him hangs around on the walls even after he’s left, that hasn’t changed, at least. 

Sometimes Crowley stands around inside them just to remember how strange it feels, this skin.

Through practice, they are very bad at avoiding each other. This is how Crowley finds himself, Sunday after the Sunday After, looking at one side of a door and listening to the sounds of Aziraphale on the other. Aziraphale is in the kitchen.

Crowley is taking a bath.

Aziraphale existing in Crowley’s space - Crowley realizes with a giddy, bewildered thrill that he _knows_ this now - is all saucers on marble, the low roll of a drawer nudged shut, tea kettle whistling. He’s spent much of the past week going through Crowley’s records, and Crowley can hear him humming along, quiet and absently off-key. Something old, soothing. Crowley stares into the water and tries to let himself be soothed.

He’s never been good at Sunday mornings. Always has the uneasy feeling that he’s supposed to be somewhere. 

But that last one - the Very First one, rather - waking to the sun hushing through the shelter of Aziraphale’s wing, fanned above their heads in some dimension they were too wrapped up inside of to see -

(In the dimension that was, Aziraphale had blinked at him with the thickness of honey and turned his smile into Crowley’s pillow.)

\- Crowley could be good at that, he thinks. He thinks.

Crowley blows out a breath and makes a face at himself in the squat reflection of the tap. Not one of the many faces he could make, fangs and rot and the like, but his human face. He’s had it for a while, and sometimes it looks very old.

He splashes the face away and rubs his eyes. It was all the doubting that got him into trouble last time, too. Couldn’t just believe in a thing. Had to look at it from all sides, open it up, see how it worked and how it didn’t. If there were pieces missing, or if the pieces didn’t quite fit together - wouldn’t you at least want to ask? Was it really that bad, this wanting to know?

Heaven is less a memory for Crowley than a dream. A nightmare: the longer he’s been outside of it, the less he wants to remember. 

Well. Being an architect, that part he liked. Building the stars. Ask anyone who’s made anything as ridiculous and infuriating as a galaxy and they’ll tell you. You can still love a thing that doesn’t make sense to you, that you think can be _better_. 

Doesn’t have to destroy the wonder of anything, to wonder.

Maybe the humans could do with imperfect obedience what Crowley hadn’t been allowed to. Or so the thinking had gone at the time.

Forget memories, forget dreams. Crowley groans, sinks into warm, warm and silent. Heaven, for him, was a womb. A wound. You can crawl out of a place like that, blood-covered, oozing. There’s just no going back.

He’d forgotten how lonely that is, at first. 

He raises his head enough to listen over the sound of water dripping from the ends of his hair. Pages turning, now. Music still going, _oh, tell me the words that I’m longing to know,_ and there are snakes that do what is happening to Crowley’s heart, what the longing and the guilt are doing there together.

_Aziraphale._ For him it was never a question of doubt so much as a question of time. Crowley had spent millennia alternately envying and enraged by Aziraphale’s conviction, had watched him wrestle over and over again and every time, _every time_ still side with belief. His faith was one of answers, where if you didn’t have them now, eventually, they would come. 

Crowley knows they did the right thing. One of his rare, cosmic-level certainties. And he would still give up everything, to give that faith back to Aziraphale. 

This feeling, this terrible feeling. Wings and a pair of scissors. _Mea culpa_ , or whatever it is they say. 

Aziraphale would forgive him, is the thing. Crowley buries his longing beside all else that is unforgivable in him and swears he will never ask him to.

He furls his papery hands together in the water. Unfurls.

We didn’t do that, he’d asked Aziraphale once, as they passed people praying in the street, some demonstration or other. Did we? It had been a long enough time at that point that Crowley didn’t remember.

Hm?

Why the - bowed heads, closed eyes, he’d said, and Aziraphale had smiled, Oh, he’d said, No, they came up with that all on their own, and then rambled on about submission or privacy or whatever until he’d added, in that desperately conversational way that always got Crowley’s attention, But you know, I do like the hand thing.

And it was exactly that, the way he said it. A little bashful, a little relieved, like back on the wall and admitting to Crowley for the first time that he _liked_ these people whose lives they existed to meddle in, found them fascinating and strange and sad, maybe even endearing, maybe lovely and worthy of it, love, and that was the look on Aziraphale’s face as he’d gazed down at his own cupped palms and said thoughtfully A prayer. Like you could hold it, here.

And then he had brushed one thumb over the other and Crowley had just ached, right down in the tips of his fingers. The ache sits at the center of him still, bathed in its own gravity, and Crowley doesn’t want space. Doesn’t even want stars. He wants Aziraphale on the right side of the door. Their side.

At the other end of the room, there’s a quiet knock.

Crowley shoots up and almost knocks over his wine glass, he looks to the door so fast. Aziraphale’s shadow is creaking back and forth in the gap below. Very faintly, if Crowley thinks backward in time, backward into himself, he can sense the outline his body heat is burning behind it. Can’t do that with anyone else, these days. But angels run warm. 

Crowley almost prays.

The door eases open around Aziraphale. “Did you need anything?”

“No,” Crowley says.

Steam is escaping into the hallway behind him. Wordlessly, Crowley beckons him inside before gesturing the door shut. 

Aziraphale cuts him a glance, then leans back against the wood, hands folded behind him. He rocks forward on the balls of his feet and back again. Outside the record is still spinning, but it’s the crackling saw that marks the beginning of the end of every record, the part of it that sounds like rain. 

“Well,” Aziraphale says. They stare at each other. If he clears his throat Crowley will discorporate them both, which Crowley would find terribly convenient, and he’s about to say so when Aziraphale finally moves. He takes a curious step toward the sink and the bottles of soap and slender colognes that Crowley’s got ringed under the mirror and reaches out to test the grey hand towel between his fingers. Crowley watches the deliberate travel of his eyes over the counter: candles, hair product and hand creams, lingering over a fern palm at the far end of the long black marble. 

“You take very good care of it,” Aziraphale says finally. 

Crowley frowns. “You think so? I was going to toss it, it’s starting to get all… withery.”

Aziraphale’s head whips toward him in surprise, and then a moment later he laughs. “Heavens. Not the plant.”

Crowley’s forehead knits, even as the way Aziraphale is looking at him tugs the knot in his chest loose. He begins to lower himself in the water again.

“Your body, Crowley,” Aziraphale says, setting down the watch he’d been fiddling with and smoothing it straight. 

“Erm,” Crowley says intelligently, and slips down faster than he means to. He rights himself with a hand on the side of the bath. “Well.” He stops, or his brain does. Both. Good care of it? Aziraphale’s got it backwards. Sure, he sleeps, he likes putting nice things on it and in it, so does Aziraphale, good clothes and good drinks and - take care of it? He looks down to where the faintly green water is starting to wrinkle his fingertips. Not always.

“I just meant that even though you could do things the easy way -”

“And I do,” Crowley interjects.

"Which you do,” Aziraphale agrees, “sometimes you also do things their way. It reminds me how long we’ve been here with them, how long we’ve been doing,” he pauses, “all this, together.”

Aziraphale hovers. Times like these, Crowley can almost see the wings. Tips trailing through the water on the floor whenever Aziraphale turns, mirrors full of sun, picking up Crowley’s dust. 

It would weigh his shoulders down. Water’s a heavy thing. Aziraphale’s eyes linger on the bathtub and leave it only to meet Crowley’s. 

“I’m sorry. I know I’ve been somewhat preoccupied, this week,” he says, and then, “I can’t seem to stop thinking about being inside you.”

Crowley’s eyebrows nearly launch themselves into orbit.

“Well. Being you, really. For the trial.”

“Of course,” Crowley says. “Of course that’s what you meant.”

“Until I was in it for myself I didn’t… Oh, your body, Crowley,” Aziraphale murmurs appreciatively, moving to tuck himself against the side of the bath. It’s not desire, though it is. The shape is different. He says Crowley’s name the way you walk through a house you plan to live inside of. 

It takes him a minute to respond. Neck warm, he mumbles, “‘S not what it used to be.”

“No,” agrees Aziraphale. “The legs are a nice touch.”

Crowley flicks his tongue at him, and some water over the side for good measure. Maybe not a house, he thinks as Aziraphale fails to tamp down a grin. Maybe a garden. 

“When I saw what it did to them,” Aziraphale presses on haltingly, “what the water would do to you, I.” 

Crowley recognizes this look, too. Passenger side. Across a thermos.

“I’d known, of course. That was why I couldn’t - why it took me so long to agree, why I still didn’t want to give it to you. But I didn’t _know_ it, not in my body. Not until I was in yours.”

His hand dips into the water beside Crowley and shuttles it from side to side. It sloshes gently up the sides of the bath, bites at Crowley’s flank. 

“What was it like,” Aziraphale asks. He sounds miserably curious, only his need to know every bloody thing making him ask that question, making him ask that question of Crowley, like it’s not always there anyway, at his neck in the dark, black and rising. “To think of me… that way? Gone,” he amends, and his eyebrows lift, a wince.

Crowley takes a careful sip of his wine, careful not to let his hand shake.

“When I thought you were dead,” he says, and notices, from a mortified distance, that he’s failed to be as careful with his voice. 

He tries again. “You called me,” he says.

Aziraphale looks puzzled.

“You called, and Hastur had me, I couldn’t do anything - as soon as I could get away, I was coming to you.” Crowley closes his eyes against the memory of that wild, awful hope, thudding through him like what he’s heard about heartbeats. _I know where the Antichrist is_ , Aziraphale’s message had said, though he had sworn to keep this from Crowley, and the adrenaline had shaken him by the throat until he found the words to get himself out, get him _home_ , because Crowley had known that for the apology it was. The offering.

“Oh,” Aziraphale murmurs, “my dear.”

“I wasn’t fast enough, that’s all I could think. For all your complaints.” Crowley looks at him. “What was it like? The world was ending. You were gone.”

Aziraphale is reaching for him before he’s even finished. He finds his hand on the side of the tub, grasps it wetly. “Yes,” Aziraphale nods. His fingers tighten, stay there. “Yes, that’s what it’s like.”

Before he can talk himself out of it, he pulls Aziraphale’s hand up to his mouth and touches his lips to the back of it. This is still so new. Such a long time, to not know his hands, their tenderness.

As he pulls back, Aziraphale is looking at him oddly. “Are you almost done? Your bath.”

“Should probably, ah. Wash my hair.”

“Can I?”

The question surprises a nod out of him. “Um. Why not,” Crowley offers, but Aziraphale has already reached past him, dances his fingers down the line of bottles on the windowsill until he finds what he’s looking for.

“I love this one on you,” he says, drizzling it into a palm and massaging it white. “Head back, if you please.”

Crowley does as asked. There’s a brief moment where there’s nothing, just his eyelids in the warm dark and the porcelain hard and cold at the back of his neck. Then a pressure at his nape. Fingertips.

Crowley might be new to their tenderness but he would know it anywhere. 

There it is at his temples, his jaw. He snaps it shut, though Aziraphale doesn’t seem to notice. His hands have moved on, are warming the space behind Crowley’s ears, studying his skull, the shape of it. They push the hair back from his forehead to keep the soap out of his eyes.

“What if we hadn’t figured it out, is what I keep wondering.” Aziraphale says at length, kneading his scalp. The sweet, grey scent of bergamot sharpens the air around them. 

Crowley hums. 

“Could spend a lot of time on what-ifs. What if it hadn’t worked, what if,” Crowley steadies himself, “What if I’d never known you at all, what if it was just me up here, or you. Here alone all that time.”

“I don’t like to - I don’t like to imagine that.”

“You think I do?”

“You don’t have to,” Aziraphale says, tugging the showerhead free from its base and testing the water against his palm.

Crowley softens. “That’s not fair. You came back. Besides, all worked out in the end, didn’t it?”

Aziraphale isn’t deterred. “I would like six thousand more years with you. Spend every day getting it right.”

“I don’t know if they’ll give us the chance,” Crowley answers immediately. He feels, all of a sudden, as if he might drown. “I’m sorry,” he chokes, cutting himself off.

An unreadable cast to those eyes. Ineffable, even. “Here,” Aziraphale says, leaning him forward, “rinse,” and for long moments in silence the water falls softly from his hair, his shoulders, his face.

Aziraphale tips him back. When he has wiped Crowley’s eyes dry he looks into them. “77 years,” he says, “for my part. Not nearly as long as you, I know. But about as long as a human life. One small, human lifetime.”

Aziraphale shakes his head, as if it’s funny to him, this thing that has never been funny. Crowley has never attended a funeral. Aziraphale has attended several, but both of them remember a time before cemeteries, before pyramids and boats, setting fire to the water. Before holes in the ground, even. Both of them were there, after all, in the time, in the garden before death. 

You got to meet so many people, doing what they did. And you had to say goodbye to all of them.

All except one.

Aziraphale smiles, because it has sometimes been sad. “All this time with them, humanity,” he says. “But the only thing we’re like is each other.”

Crowley’s breath shakes its way in and back out. He doesn’t need it and he does and the truth is somewhere in the middle, that nebulous place he and Aziraphale have always shared. 

“We don’t die, not like they do,” Crowley says quietly. “But do we get an afterlife?” And more quietly still: “No one’s ever said.”

Aziraphale’s answer is a long time coming, but it comes: “I think this is an afterlife, of a kind.”

The water trembles, as if far away some great beast is walking, and all Crowley can think is _how does anyone_ do _this_ , love in the shadow of death?

Crowley rises up toward him, the water cascading from his shoulders to his hips, spooling down toward the heavy meet of his thighs, bowed as he kneels in the low water. Aziraphale eyes him. Less a question there than a waiting. Crowley doubts, doubts, doubts. Holds his hands alongside Aziraphale’s face and feels the lines smooth against his palms.

“I’d save you,” he croaks. “If anything happened to you, I, I wouldn’t let it.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale nods, “I know. You saved the world for me.”

“Would do it again,” Crowley answers. “In a heartbeat, if I had one. Just ask me, angel. Please ask me.”

Aziraphale’s hands come up to soften over Crowley’s wrists as he lets their heads fall together. Outside the fingers of the rain go tapping on the window panes, the storm beginning in some place the color of Aziraphale's eyes, but inside there's only Aziraphale and his thumbing over the absence of Crowley’s pulse, as if considering the shape and value of what he's been offered.

Aziraphale speaks into the skin under his eye. “Can you let me take care of you?” he whispers, and Crowley starts to shake against the guiding steadiness of Aziraphale’s hand, sudden at the small of his back.

“Here,” Aziraphale’s saying, “Come on, let’s get you dried,” and though they could do this the easy way, by unspoken agreement they decide to do it the way humans do, Aziraphale settling him at the edge of the bath and rubbing a towel down the length of his arms, his sides, kneeling to sop carefully at his groin and his legs and at the soles of each foot. 

He hands back the towel and Crowley expects him to stand but Aziraphale stays where he is, indicating the bath products lined up along the window sill. 

“The one that smells like anise, I think. Liquorice.”

“I know what anise smells like, I bought it,” Crowley snaps as he hands it over, or in what would have been a snap, if he could stop trembling, if Aziraphale weren’t unscrewing the cap and dabbing Crowley’s ankles with oil, his wrists and his armpits, trailing it up the crease of each thigh, his touch light and sure enough to make Crowley bite back a groan. Aziraphale notices, of course he does, Crowley can tell by the pleased little upswing at the corner of his mouth, but he doesn’t say anything, just brushes oil under his jaw and holds him there.

He leans back to look fully into Crowley’s face. Crowley lets himself be looked at, lets himself look as Aziraphale hesitates, but only for a moment. 

“‘It is holy,’” Aziraphale murmurs, mostly to himself, “‘and it shall be holy to you.’” 

He swipes his thumb over Crowley’s forehead, kisses him so briefly Crowley doesn’t even have time to register it as a kiss, and sinks back down. Crowley’s belly gets another kiss, a tender bite to the flesh above his navel before Aziraphale is retrieving the oil from the floor and rising to his feet, urging Crowley up along with him. 

He doesn’t need the light, and while he knows Aziraphale doesn’t either, he snatches a candle off the counter as he follows him out of the bathroom.

Aziraphale leads them into the gloom of the hallway. He takes a few steps, then pauses. “Could you -” he starts, turning back to Crowley, and huffs a laugh at the sight of the tea light couched in his hands. 

“Why, hello, Ebenezer, fancy meeting -”

“Oi, shut it,” Crowley warns, jerking the candle back behind his cupped fingers. It flickers bravely against the dark. “Dickens was a twat.”

“That’s a biblical term, you know.”

Crowley grins delightedly. “It _isn’t_.”

" _Ebenezer_ ,” Aziraphale emphasizes. “Something physical to… remind you of the spiritual.”

It’s a terrible line, and Aziraphale is closer than he was before. Crowley can count his eyelashes, lit gold by the candlelight.

Aziraphale’s hand closes around his at the base of the candle. For a moment they stand together, holding the fire between them. Then Aziraphale’s lips round, a quick exhale, and they are breathing at each other in the dark. 

A warm hand rests on the tense bit of belly by his hip. “Shh,” Aziraphale tells it. Crowley bites his tongue as Aziraphale presses closer, the line of him against all of Crowley’s lines, stomachs touching, chests, and then his mouth is fogging at the skin of Crowley’s neck. 

“Put the candle down,” murmurs the voice beneath his ear, and Crowley’s hands scramble to comply. When he turns back Aziraphale is moving into his space, his mouth is, a firm hand on the side of his jaw to hold Crowley in place for him. 

_Wherever you want me, I’m there_ , Crowley begs, thinks it with his hand fisted in the fabric between Aziraphale’s shoulder blades. If he can’t be Good for Aziraphale, well, he’ll be good enough.

Aziraphale sighs into his mouth as Crowley undoes his belt and slips a hand inside, cups him gently. He strokes, soft fingers.

“Beautiful,” Aziraphale says. His hand reaches down and finds Crowley’s wrist.

Their progress is slow. They keep tipping into walls to touch each other. Halfway down the hall Crowley skims Aziraphale’s vest from his shoulders, but there’s nowhere to put it and Aziraphale would pout about the wrinkles, so he drapes it over the crook of his arm and resumes kissing him. Only several long moments later does he notice that the weight of it at his elbow is gone.

“Cheating,” he breathes across Aziraphale’s tongue. One of Aziraphale’s palms is flat by his ear, the other on his ribs, guiding Crowley back against the wall.

He raises an eyebrow. “Are you complaining?”

Crowley hooks a leg around his ankle and drags him in. Aziraphale grinds them together and Crowley’s other leg jerks and falls open at the hip, hovers, knee bobbing in the air with every press, anything to invite Aziraphale closer and keep him there. His jaw’s done the same thing too, gone all slack, and the noises he’s making seem louder with all the extra space or maybe they just are. 

“I just think,” Crowley manages, when they’ve paused to get back some measure of control, “if you were going to deal with one, why not deal with them all?”

Aziraphale kisses the very tip of his nose. “Bedroom,” he says.

Inside, Aziraphale sits on the edge of the bed and slips off his shoes. Crowley shadows the doorway, drinks in the milky silhouette Aziraphale makes as he takes off his clothes and welcomes in the dark. 

He steps in as Aziraphale starts on his shirt, batting his hands aside. Aziraphale’s look is almost reproach but something else as Crowley slithers into his lap, working the line of buttons until there’s enough room for him to slip a hand inside. 

Surprises him every time, how warm Aziraphale is. He can feel it in all the places they meet, thighs, foreheads, the hand Aziraphale knots in his own on the bed beside them as Crowley rolls against him, making small almost-sounds.

Aziraphale opens him, there just like that, shirt shrugged from his shoulders so he can move, the oil and his hands, warm, the air between them building heavy and dark, some summer night just before rain, hotter than burning, and Crowley would know, wouldn’t he, gasps it in anyway like a man living again, like a man, like living. 

Sweat gleams between Aziraphale’s collarbones. Crowley leans in to taste it in the lines beneath his eyes, the bow of his lips.

“Ah!” Aziraphale draws the sudden sound from him so forcefully it tips him forward, enough to upset their balance, but Aziraphale carries them gently down to bed. He suspects the wings, doesn’t bother to voice it. There’s a delirious moment where he writhes _down_ and Aziraphale pushes _up_ and they gasp at each other in silence and then he’s on his back with Aziraphale above him, knocking his knees apart and slipping his fingers back inside. 

“I’m ready,” Crowley pleads, “I’mready’mready’mready,” and when Aziraphale withdraws Crowley yanks him down to settle between Crowley’s thighs.

Aziraphale smiles at him, serene. “Hello.”

He’s so annoying. It makes Crowley sick, how much he loves him. “Hi,” Crowley says back.

Aziraphale shifts, on purpose. Bastard. “How exactly did I put it earlier?” Aziraphale adds, and this time Crowley hears the smirk in his voice. “‘I can’t seem to stop thinking about being inside you,’ wasn't it?”

Crowley groans, outraged and horribly, immensely turned on. “I knew it, I knew it. You do it on purpose.”

Aziraphale laughs into his mouth, kiss after breathless kiss. “I am just _delighted_ by you,” he says when he surfaces several long minutes later, and Crowley has turned to water underneath him. 

Crowley tips his head back and closes his eyes against it but Aziraphale knows him better than that. Like the first night they’d done this, _you can stay at my place, if you like_ , Crowley’s hands shaking as he keyed open the door just to stall in the entryway, no light to see by, just the pale gutter from the street outside pushing past them into his flat and getting lost in the dark.

Aziraphale had reached up and taken Crowley’s sunglasses from his face before folding them carefully onto the table by the door.

There you are, he’d said then, and: I can see you now.

Aziraphale holds Crowley between his palms, all of him, lays their faces against one another so close they might share the same one. Two halves of the same wholeness. Aziraphale’s breath puffs lightly against his cheek, or the other way round. Crowley stares into the slow, wet blink of the eye above him, a penumbra of moon. 

_Here I am_ , Crowley thinks.

Aziraphale leans his forehead into Crowley’s temple as he presses inside, that eye whispering shut only when Crowley gives around him on a broken exhale. Crowley’s hands tremble, careening across his shoulders, his spine. They settle, turning white on Aziraphale’s forearms. It’s so, so much, they’re so close - Crowley can _shift_ \- oh - _oh,_ and there’s the echo of it, overtaking Aziraphale’s face. 

Wonder. He traces it with his fingertips.

“Good?” Aziraphale asks quietly.

Crowley swallows, his throat dry. He closes his eyes. “Good.”

They rock together in the dark, long movements, Aziraphale driving slowly between Crowley’s thighs. His lovely, soft stomach rides Crowley’s cock, tensing when Crowley’s fingers dip into the sweat beneath his spine to urge him closer. He almost whines, the sweetness of the drag inside him digging his toes into the mattress.

Aziraphale coaxes out more. A hand beneath Crowley’s knee bends it gently back toward his chest. His other still has the back of Crowley’s head in a careful cradle, and between these two, everywhere points of contact, Crowley opens, pinging between them like submerged wire, each thrust hitting flatter and deeper, lungs shocked into gasping.

He’s exciting Aziraphale, he can feel him, a just so slightly-a-little-bit faster, the hot jolt when he loses himself, just for a second. More, Crowley wants more of that, small erosions in the slow, controlled love Aziraphale is making for him. 

“Slowly, angel,” he begs lazily, and Aziraphale drops his head into the crook of Crowley’s neck with a breathless laugh. It slides into a groan that makes Crowley’s stomach flip, Aziraphale acquiescing, fucking him so slowly now it’s barely perceptible as movement.

For a moment they lose themselves in it, Aziraphale looking at Crowley and Crowley looking at Aziraphale, looking. Crowley can see himself, reflected in Aziraphale’s eye. 

He struggles: not to blink, to believe what he sees there. 

“You are, you know,” Aziraphale says. 

Crowley begins to shake.

“Good.”

Aziraphale is a shield above him as Crowley comes, unexpected, almost silent, shuddering against him with his nails clinging moon-halves into Aziraphale’s hands.

He doesn’t hear much of what Aziraphale says, praising him in and through and out of it, but after Aziraphale has soothed the stretch of Crowley’s thighs, after he’s let Crowley bring him off with his hands, Aziraphale bowed and beautiful, bisected by white beams of lightning, all while the thunderstorm had moved over their bed and raged, though unheard to either of them, and rolled farther and farther away as the quiet moved in:

“‘Beloved,’” Crowley murmurs. 

Water pings off the rails of the fire escape. Still morning, through the thin gap in the curtains, at least, a spoke of barely-light that cuts across the darkness and winds between the sheets twisted on the floor. Still Sunday. The bed shifts as Aziraphale lifts his shoulders.

“You are,” Aziraphale says. 

Crowley swallows up at the ceiling. Sometimes, in the course of his life, he’s been glad of the dark. “Even when I’m not nice?”

“Especially then.” 

Crowley tips his head toward Aziraphale. “I’m not a man of faith. Not a man, for starters.” Aziraphale doesn’t allow him this easy out, waiting quietly for Crowley to finish. Crowley exhales in a rush: “But I got to be you, too.”

“What did you think?”

Aziraphale is smiling and Crowley doesn’t need light to see when he can hear exactly which one it is but Crowley misses it all the same, and doesn’t the fondness following that thought just make his chest burn. Crowley had thought it might kill him, just trying to contain it, to embody his goodness. Part of him thinks Aziraphale would have lived anyway, that Crowley knew what the angels didn’t: Aziraphale is incandescent. No fire can touch him. He would lay his palms along Aziraphale’s face, just to feel the warmth creasing each eye, if he were bolder. He would bow his head. He would close his eyes.

Crowley’s mouth cocks. “Nothing else like it.” 

He can’t say what would happen next, if he did. But he rolls to face Aziraphale all the same, tells him: “Faith’s what I’ve got, in this.”

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you disappear for six years and then get run over, spiritually speaking, by the amazon prime delivery truck - it happens! imagine me posting this in big sunglasses and a terrible wig. 
> 
> title is from jason isbell and the 400 unit's [song of the same name](https://open.spotify.com/track/250RLekaiL1q9qZer975Eg?si=zvLzBa4FQemMapKh9zUrAw), and there's a lyric in here from [my prayer](https://open.spotify.com/track/0lU0wvIQcZLmo5JeNungX8) by the ink spots. [exodus](https://biblehub.com/esv/exodus/30-32.htm) also makes an appearance.
> 
> am no longer really active in fandom spaces so come find me on twitter at [apiologee](https://twitter.com/apiologee), if you like, and thanks for reading!


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